She has a lot of common sense and is in tune with public feelings.”Remarkably, Dame Elizabeth, educated at Wycombe Abbey, a boarding school for brainy, well-to-do girls, did not go to university Instead she went straight to the Bar in 1955 Her rise was not exactly meteoric. She had three children, two sons and one daughter, which must have slowed down her career initially but has had positive, long-term effects. By raising her own family she was giving herself an understanding and a sensitivity that is often absent from haughtier, male judges operating in the same field. “Family law is primarily about sorting out relationships when things go wrong Personal skills have to be refined,” says one lawyer.

“She is friendly and approachable, and that allows people to say what they want to say and have a fair hearing.”She had an unsuccessful brush with politics, standing in the 1959 election as a Conservative candidate in Lambeth before concentrating on her family and family law. “She may look austere and formidable but when you meet her privately she is there for you,” says Marilyn Mornington, a district judge in Liverpool “She is very warm She is very strong. Very much a mother and a grandmother.”Dame Elizabeth was appointed a lowly divorce registrar in 1970 and then a High Court judge in 1979. Her stewardship of the Cleveland child-abuse inquiry led to the groundbreaking Children Act 1989, which ensured that children could not be summarily removed from parents to “places of safety” unless absolutely necessary, giving children, for the first time, “respect and consideration” under the law.Four years later she was on a panel of three judges who ruled that doctors could stop artificially feeding Tony Bland, the brain-damaged victim of the Hillsborough stadium disaster. Then in 1998 she issued landmark guidelines saying that courts would no longer give hospitals permission to perform surgery – such as deliveries by Caesarean section – without the patient’s consent. In the same year, she was ordered to take driving lessons in lieu of prosecution, following a car crash she caused. That crash and a subsequent rumpus over claims – false ones, as it turned out – that she had been given preferential treatment to avoid a court case created as many headlines as the groundbreaking judgments she has made in recent years.

It allowed her to be portrayed as yet another decrepit, senile judge in a long tradition of decrepit, senile British judges. It did her a grave injustice.She is described as “robust” and “practical”, “a decisive, clear thinker”, although some commentators claim she lacks the “analytically sparkling legal intellect” that might have made her a law lord. Dame Elizabeth may now be too old to achieve the honour of becoming the first female law lord, and that opportunity is likely to fall to Dame Brenda Hale, one of only two female Court of Appeal judges.One senior barrister calls Dame Elizabeth a “natural conservative because her view is always – provided the patient is mentally competent – that the patients should decide for themselves” But she is not so easily pigeon-holed. She is also a champion of such liberal causes as the right of gay couples to adopt children.Certainly, the case of Miss B will test her to the limits.

If true to form, one would expect her to allow Miss B the right to die by giving her the right to withdraw medical treatment. Whatever the judgment – reserved until a later date – Dame Elizabeth’s ruling will be based on common sense and a profound understanding of the law. The consequence could be somebody in a hospital having to flick the switch that takes a life.. Languages are possibly the most complicated structures the human mind has ever invented but, tragically, our species’ most impressive creations are dying. According to the British linguist David Crystal, an indigenous language currently disappears every two weeks. By the end of the century, it is projected, 5,500 of the current 6,000 languages now spoken will join Latin and Greek as “dead languages”.